Month: November 2023

But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?

Happy 60th anniversary of a certain BBC science-fiction program to everyone but Stef Coburn. In honour of Doctor Who‘s anniversary, let me present to you possibly the greatest behind the scenes photo ever taken for that show:

William Hartnell, out of costume, apparently demonstrating to someone very much in costume how he gets a million years to the gallon from the TARDIS. I had no idea who the cowboy was and a quick replay of “The Gunfighters”—the comedy western serial which had to have been the logical source for the picture, right?—turned up no one I could see with that combination of sideburns and moustache… which, apparently, is because this picture isn’t actually from that story; Clayton Hickman says it was actually taken just before the recording of “The Feast of Steven”, the infamous Christmas episode of “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, and the cowboy is one William Hall, the film critic for the London Evening News (the belt apparently did turn up in “The Gunfighters” a few months late). How William Hall came to be an extra on Doctor Who, exactly where and how he appeared in that episode (presumably the old Hollywood film set scene?), and why he was already in costume before recording but Hartnell wasn’t are further mysteries I would now love to see answered…

I’d better stop calling him Oolong, I suppose

So this was Oolong—sorry, I’d better call him his proper name in case he comes for me—this, I say, was Elon Reeve Musk’s latest entirely rational, carefully considered, and not at all drug-induced public statement in between his vendettas against Media Matters For America and the ADL and “anti-whiteness”. Somewhere Mark Zuckerberg is howling with laughter from within an MMA cage, and Elon’s investors who gave him the money he needed to buy Twitter must be delighted at the value they’ve got from him in return.

Honestly, someone needs to get him off the ketamine. He might not sound like quite so much of a cunt at least.

WHEW

Aardman Says Its Future Is Fine After Clay Shortage Worries

After a weekend report that one of the most famous stop-motion animation houses in the world—Aardman, the team behind Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and more—was on the verge of running out of the unique clay they use to craft their creations went viral, the studio has now spoken out to assuage fan concerns.
A report by British newspaper The Telegraph went viral this weekend, after it claimed that Aardman only had enough supplies of modelling clay to make one more movie—its upcoming Wallace and Gromit project for Netflix—after the sole producer of Lewis Newplast in the United Kingdom, based out of Torquay, closed its factory earlier this year.
Lewis Newplast has been used by Aardman since its founding in the 1970s, and is renowned not just for its malleability but, crucial for a studio like Aardman, its ability to retain its shape under the intense heat of studio lighting. When the factory announced its closure earlier this year, Aardman purchased the majority of their remaining supplies, hoping to pad out its reserves to make the two projects it had publicly committed to in a deal with Netflix: a sequel to Chicken Run, Dawn of the Nugget, set to hit the streamer next month, and a new Wallace and Gromit film, set to release some time in 2024. But after the report sparked fears that Aardman itself might be done if a suitable replacement for Lewis Newplast couldn’t be found, the studio took to social media today to assure fans that it had no plans to go away any time soon.

I never even thought about the fact that someone had to supply the clay, let alone that it might be one factory over decades and that it might shut down; happily, it seems they’ve got enough of the old stuff left over and they’re working on new stuff. As long as the fingerprints are still visible on the screen, that’s what really matters…

Doctor Who and the Davros Discourse

So not all Doctor Who fans who were looking forward to the return of Russell T. Davies as the showrunner are thrilled by his first effort:

Yeah, all-walking all-talking all-dancing all-singing Davros (OK, maybe not the singing and dancing) in the new Doctor Who Children in Need special has really got on some people’s tits. Because I’m not a complete idiot, I understand why; able-bodied Davros is quite a change for that character, who we’ve never seen like this before (except for that episode with child Davros). The episode itself is basically a comedy sketch (despite RTD’s puzzling insistence on Instagram that it isn’t) where Fourteen arrives at Skaro while Davros is still developing his Mark 3 Travel Machine, which has a notable difference in design that the Doctor fiddles with. It’s kind of adorable even as it screws with canon in a self-aware way that could’ve been irritating were it less funny.

Now, because I understand why people are worked up over the depiction of Davros before whatever turned him into Michael Wisher in “Genesis of the Daleks” happened, I also understand RTD’s rationalisation for same:

Discussing the new-look Davros, Russell T Davies tells Doctor Who Unleashed that it was a conscious decision to move away from some outdated cultural stereotypes. Discussing the Dalek creator’s problematic legacy, RTD reflected on his discomfort about continuing to play into the trope of the “wheelchair-using, disabled, disfigured monster.” Of course, the appeal of the original 1970s Davros design was the iconic image of a half-man, half-Dalek which became as instantly recognizable as his creations. Unintentional though it was, the image of a scarred and hateful scientist and his Dalek wheelchair does play into this outdated and harmful trope.

And some of the commentary has been perfectly positive:

Of course, listening to disabled voices means acknowledging that disabled people aren’t a monolith and, as brother Ian demonstrates above, not all of us agree with Davies on this one… indeed, I had a squiz at the comments of the Youtube video of him saying this stuff and yeah, lots of people not really into it, with asking the fairly pertinent question of whether this ultimately just amounts to disability erasure. Personally, I’m not sure where I myself stand on all of this; not just because the subject is complicated—rather more so than the general discourse seems to think—but so is how I in particular relate to me being disabled.

Because I acquired my disability; I wasn’t actually born with this less than fully functional carcass… and I’ve never been entirely able to shake the suspicion that it’s not a “proper” disability somehow. That I’m a second-class cripple or something. I think the fact that I’m not in a wheelchair (though I expect to end up in one eventually) adds to that. I can’t remember exactly where or when, but I think it was in the Guardian that once I read an article that was obviously well-meaning about disability, but something about it definitely made me feel… kind of lesser as someone with an acquired disability rather than having been born with one. Probably it was just me, I’m sure that whoever wrote it didn’t mean it that way, but, well, that’s how I’ve seen myself ever since.

EDIT: I later saw this post on Bluesky regarding Ian Levine losing his shit above:

And while I entirely understand the point being made, in that I also have a different experience of disability to someone born with one, it doesn’t do anything to help my sense that my different experience is also a lesser one.

Accordingly, I find myself a bit… mixed about the Davros thing. I never actually saw him as contributing to the “disabled evil man” trope… but then again when I first saw him in “Genesis of the Daleks” in 1986 I wasn’t disabled myself, and I don’t think I even knew that it was a trope. (Or what a trope was, for that matter.) At any rate, I don’t think I ever saw Davros being in his Mark 3 Travel Machine as the thing that made him evil as such. I still don’t. That may just be me. I don’t really know. I would be curious to know what if any advice from disabled people Davies took before doing this.

I do want to note one thing I’m not seeing many if any people bring up in relation to all of this, which is that the show has kind of done this before. Back in the dim dark past of 1989, in “The Curse of Fenric”, one of the main secondary characters was Dr. Judson, the man running the Ultima machine from his wheelchair… until he gets taken over by the spirit of Fenric and can suddenly walk again. I don’t recall seeing any comparable reaction to this at the time, though admittedly I wasn’t really paying attention either; in 1989/90 there was no social media and people had to spew their venom forth in actual print in Doctor Who Bulletin or something, which I think I’d finally got sick of and stopped reading around then.

And probably no one cared, cos Judson wasn’t exactly an iconic Who villain on the order of Davros. But I do wonder what the people going off now think about that older episode. Especially with what we also know now about how Ian Briggs modelled Judson on Alan Turing and wanted him and the military commander in the story to both be gay and have had a past with each other, but the BBC weren’t having that in their on-its-last-legs SF series in 1989. How do we all feel about that, I wonder…

But the ultimate problem with the episode is that Davros should never have been brought back in the first place in the original series, as he was in 1979. With all due respect to messrs Gooderson Molloy & Bleach, I’ve always thought he should’ve been a one-and-done in “Genesis”. And for all that I enjoyed the episode; I thought having Julian Bleach play Davros out of the chair rather than in it was a really interesting idea (and he still looks like Davros somehow even without the mask and makeup), and the general comedic angle of it all was well done (Nicholas Briggs was spot on as the voice of Nyder, too). Maybe this makes me a Bad Disabled Person. Then again, I’ve never been much of a good one. CRIPPLE PUNK WHOO!

Anyway, as a closing thought, suffice to say I find this a bit over the top:

I know this is from Ian Levine’s FB group and I don’t think he started this, but I’m sure he’s all in favour of it. If it stops him making “Davros in Distress”, I’ll take it too…

Carlo Collodi is confused

I just found out why ads keep appearing in my Facebook feed, i.e. the browser extension, Fluff Busting Purity, I’ve been using to stop them from appearing wasn’t working… whether the thing just stopped behaving by itself or I neglected to actually install it after I started using Firefox rather than Chrome a few months ago (the latter being a distinct possibility) is something I don’t know; I always used my own properly chronological feed rather than the main FB page which barely knows what day it is, so I was never bothered by them until FB started fighting its way past the ad-blocking and FBP had to keep putting out new patches.

Anyway, they’ve been get more numerous of late and every time I see one I just curse and report it as spam, but I must confess that I actually was glad—before reporting it as the scam it surely is—that I was exposed to whatever the fuck THIS is:

How amazing is that? I mean, these things are usually bullshit, of course, but this has had an unusual degree of effort put into its bullshit. In the original version of Collodi’s story Pinocchio actually gets executed at the end, Collodi seems to have very much viewed him as a kind of warning about the sort of misbehaviour Pinocchio engages in. Admittedly I’ve never read the original, but I’m fairly sure the words “pineal gland” don’t occur in it and they certainly have piss all to do with the derivation of Pinocchio’s name. Really, the bullshit is above and beyond with this one; I almost had to admire it before blocking it.

Needs more actual tubular bells

Oh this is GOOD (and rather more pleasant than my last batch of posts). If playing a church organ properly requires this much work, then I simply COULD NOT. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of Mr Oldfield’s celebrated prog masterwork, and hot damn. The coordination of hands over multiple sets of keys and feet on the pedals needed to play this just stuns me; no wonder Theo’s got an extra pair of hands standing by. Stunning stuff.

Other companies not OK with Nazism either!

X ad boycott gathers pace amid antisemitism storm

An advertising boycott of social media platform X is gathering pace amid an antisemitism storm on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Apple, Disney, Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery have all halted advertising on X, US media report, following hot on the heels of IBM.
The European Commission, TV network Paramount and movie studio Lionsgate have also pulled ad dollars from X.
It comes after X owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic trope.
The corporate boycott has also been picking up steam in the wake of an investigation by a US group which flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.
A spokesperson for X told the BBC on Thursday that the company does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content” and the platform is dedicated to combatting antisemitism.

And what do the ADL make of this?

On Friday evening, the ADL – one of the most vocal critics of how X moderates incendiary content – offered rare praise for Mr Musk’s steps to fight hate on the platform.
Mr Musk had posted on X that anyone using terms such as “from the river to the sea” – which the ADL has described as a coded call for Israel’s destruction – could be suspended from the platform.
ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt replied that this was “an important and welcome move”.

I couldn’t resist posting on the Bad Place for once what Oolong had said about the ADL just the day before Greenblatt said that (not that he’ll notice):

One of the other terms Oolong is claiming implies genocide is “decolonisation”. I don’t understand that. Genocide against whom, the colonisers? And what else has the world’s favourite white South African billionaire had to say on the current matter?

Well, that’s certainly one way to get those advertisers to stop boycotting you, I suppose. But insulting the ADL has kept Stephen Greenblatt on-side, obviously, so maybe it’ll work this time too…